Book: The Metaphysical Club

This is one of the best books I've read--ever. For sheer substance,
for bringing alive the complexity and interrelations in the history
of ideas, for making sense of some underpinnings of American thought
that are needed now, as they say, more than ever. It also debunked
many givens for me, as it detailed toward the end, the uses and
misuses of the "due process" clause of the 14th amendment. I'd known
that it was misappropriated to protect business enterprises,
conferring on them the same intrinsic rights as individual persons,
but I hadn't known of Oliver Wendell Holmes dissenting opinion of
that misuse as the enshrining of an economic ideology that it should
have been anathema to the Constitution to protect. And his later
dissent in the Abrams case, over the jailing of socialist
pamphleteers during World War I, and how that opinion, albeit a
dissent, helped pave the way for strong protections of free speech as
later interpreted by Brandeis from the 14th amendment in 1925. The
birth and evolution of thoughts of the "pragmatists" are traced as
relating very specifically to lessons learned from the Civil War,
particularly in Holmes' case (who was wounded, once nearly mortally,
in 3 different battles). It's a prizing of democratic process, not
on the basis of intrinsic human rights, but because a plurality of
voices will assure that the ideas in the best interest of society are
adopted. Pragmatism is pervaded by a distrust of ideology, of ideas
abstracted from context, because they inevitably lead to violent
conflict. The thought of Dewey, particularly as it was impacted by
his coming into contact with Jane Addams at the time of the Pullman
strike outside Chicago (1893?) moves in parallel. The idea that
antagonisms are simply failures to understand common cause,
misinterpretations. And Dewey's extrapolations bearing on education,
the following of instincts, the etiology of mental development
understood in a new way. In these, in particular, the book leaves me
with a great hunger to learn more. The evolution of these ideas
really make visceral sense as well by being grounded in their
reaction against certain fundamentalisms of their forefathers
represented in analogue by Darwin's challenge to Agassiz' and other
then-current theocratic theories of life's history and origins; how
William James came to value indeterminacy and a certain self-making
in philosophy, the overlooked contributions of Charles Peirce and
Chauncy Wright (which are as fascinating as they are for me still
hard to retain!) In fact the book is so exciting, so packed, so
alive with anecdote and relevance that it, probably alone among all
the books I've ever read, makes me wonder about the missed joys of
academic life. Menand is so brilliant he's apparently both an
academic and trader in ideas outside the gates, writer for New
Yorker, this book etc. This work has no must on it; it is no stale
recitation as some have been, such as Richardson's "Emerson: The Mind
on Fire", a book that was certainly very damp for its subject. It
lives, it wants to be read more than once, it's an invitation to
taking stock in a powerful grounded way of the place we find
ourselves today. Unqualified triumph I say. I'll read whatever
Menand puts out.

Bride-gear General

The bride sat like a general issuing orders. "Don't drag my train while you're at it" etc.

how much violence is ok?

I keep asking, when they talk about mistreatment of detainees. isn't
humane treatment of prisoners gilding the turd. support our troops?
you mean because we find it necessary to kill? why not, "support our
alcoholics" because we find it necessary to drink?

EKE

Documentary called "Eke" in which people who are comfortably
millionaires detail how they earned or came by the money. Eked out
their existence...

The Engaged Couple in the Photograph

together, looking out at you as from the hold of a spaceship, trying
and transparently failing not to betray the judgment they are placing
on the airless hostile environment around them. Because this is how
he read the photograph of the couple, the real airlessness, the trap,
seemed to be where they were, sealed off from commerce with the world
of ideas and affections.

Jane Addams' "A Modern Lear" - 1896

and the idea of "affectionate interpretation". Her refusal to
recognize the reality of antagonisms between capital (or a
paternalistic benefactor like George Pullman) and labor. Her
reflections on the Pullman strike, resulting from residents in
Pullman's model town of Pullman Illinois striking when their wages
were cut due to a cyclical depression yet Pullman resisted cutting
their rents accordingly. Goes to the core of the transformation in
Addams' thinking about the harm that can be inflicted by
philanthropy, to the extent that it privileges the benefactor and
puts him/her out of touch with the spirit of the time, the moral
ethic unique to the current generation, the "consent" of one's fellow
men. On the other side she chided the laborers for having no piety
with which to balance and negotiate their claim. The new order must
always acknowledge its debt to the old. The analogy is with the
family and the breakdown of affection and family claim in King Lear.
Good food for thought. Was apparently a big impetus in the
intellectual life of John Dewey.